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Who Doesn’t Want to Save Time?

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Debbie Douglas is a busy woman. As broadcast traffic manager at The Martin Agency, Douglas spends part of her day assigning identification codes to the thousands of ads the agency produces annually. It’s just a smaller part of her day than it used to be.

The Martin Agency uses Ad-ID as the platform to uniquely register every single ad asset — broadcast, print, and digital — they produce for all clients, which include Oreo and GEICO. Douglas says it’s so much faster to generate identifying codes with Ad-ID than the older, manual method of ISCI coding.

“Ad-ID is extremely easy to use,” she says. “It gets the job done and saves a lot of time. Who doesn’t want to save time?”

As the agency that helps brands “find and tap into new energy,” Martin tapped into new energy of its own when it started using Ad-ID in 2007. Douglas says the agency soon discovered that Ad-ID offered “many necessary checks and balances that we could not pass up. Once we used the system, we realized that it serves as a great organizational tool and is a much better way to keep track of our commercial codes, rather than doing it manually ourselves.”

Besides offering a reliable tracking tool, Ad-ID supplies an important built-in safeguard. ”Our prefixes back then were a risk — when you set up codes in ISCI, there’s a chance a code won’t be unique,” says Douglas. “Ad-ID, of course, confirms that will never happen.”

Each unique Ad-ID code consists of a prefix, which is unique to a company or brand, and a seven- or eight-character sequence number.

Within a few years, Martin had transitioned all its clients to Ad-ID, winning them over with a solution that not only generates unique identifiers automatically, but proves its value as a time-saving reference tool.

“There was a bit of a transition as we moved from generating codes for free with ISCI to paid codes,” Douglas acknowledges, but notes Ad-ID places a ceiling on cost for clients generating high volumes of codes. “Our clients quickly saw the value, as Ad-ID is used by Martin for several other functions besides just code assignment.”

Douglas says she uses the web-based platform and all the metadata stored by Ad-ID to research invoices and determine how many ads have been created per client. When her vendors reference the same Ad-ID codes, she knows how often an asset has been used and where and when talent residual payments are due. Creating Ad-ID codes also gives Douglas and her traffic department a heads-up on start dates of media buys for ads that are in production.

“Ad-ID to me is more than just an automated code database,” she says. “It’s a research tool that helps me in other areas of my daily job. It gives me time to focus on other projects.”

The Martin Agency centralizes Ad-ID creation in its traffic department, “the perfect place,” Douglas says, to keep things organized and the metadata consistent. She and a colleague create all the codes with information received via email from commercial producers. They can cut and paste the data from the email, reducing data entry and potential errors. In addition, their clients use Extreme Reach as their distribution vendor, which is integrated with Ad-ID, so when producers upload Ad-ID–coded spots, the metadata automatically uploads with them, saving time as well.

Douglas, who recalls the days when producers created ISCI codes, says Ad-ID is not only much easier and faster, it leads to better organization and more easily searchable data.

“If you want to be organized and on top of your game with your ad assets, Ad-ID is how you do it.”